“Just curious,” Hasso said. Whatever the Grenye did wasn’t real magic for them. For him, with the right spell cast by the right kind of mind, it might be. Their notions would give him a place to start, anyhow. And he knew he couldn’t screw every night till he got to Falticeni. He didn’t want to screw in Muresh. It would remind him of all the rapes here during the sack.

With the air of a man humoring an eccentric – a lunatic? – Rautat answered, “Well, we use nettle and yarrow and prayer.”

Hasso discovered that he was smiling. What did Shakespeare say? Out of this nettle, danger, we pluck this flower, safety – that was it. Maybe old Will knew more than he let on. He often seemed to.

“Can you get me some of each?” Hasso asked. He knew nettles when he saw them. Yarrow, to him, was only a name.

“I’ll send someone out to get you the plants, yes.” Rautat gave him a crooked smile. “You’ll have to find our own prayer, though. I don’t know where that grows around here.”

After what the Lenelli did to Muresh, Hasso guessed all the prayer in these parts had been torn up by the roots. He laughed anyway, to show Rautat he got the joke. And, a couple of hours later, a gray-haired Bucovinan woman brought in a nettle and another plant – Hasso supposed it was yarrow. The woman eyed him. “Do you speak our language?” she asked.

He nodded. “Yes – not too well, though.”

“Were you in Muresh when the Lenelli ravished it?”

“Yes,” Hasso said again.

She nodded, too, as if he’d proved some point. And he must have, because she said, “No wonder you have bad dreams.” She knew what the yarrow and nettle were for, then. Well, who likelier to believe an old wives’ tale than an old wife?

“I take any oath you want – I fought clean here.” Hasso was amazed by how glad he was to be telling the truth. He couldn’t have said the same thing about what he’d done in Russia. Well, how many Russians had clean hands in Germany?

And, truthteller or not, he failed to impress the Bucovinan woman. “Even so,” she said, and walked away without waiting for an answer. What had happened to her when Bottero’s army came through Muresh? What had happened to the people she loved? Hasso didn’t have the nerve to ask.

Yarrow had fine, tiny leaves and a spicy scent. As the woman had, Hasso handled the nettle by the root to keep from getting stung. He held the yarrow in the other hand and chanted in German. He was sure the natives would rather he’d used Bucovinan. But he had no idea whether magic here paid any attention to the natives’ language. He knew damn well he could cast a spell in German that worked: he’d done it before. So he tried it again.

And what would happen when Aderno and Velona tried to afflict him again? That’s why you’re casting the spell, jerk – to find out what’ll happen. With luck, Aderno wouldn’t be able to get through at all. I’m sorry, sir. You seem to have reached a disconnected brain. Hasso snorted. Yeah, his brain seemed disconnected, all right, even to him.

The only way to discover what would happen was to fall asleep. Hasso approached the night with all the enthusiasm of a soldier about to have a wound tended by a drunken, stupid medic. When it came to wizardry, that was about what he was, and he knew it. The only reason he looked like a doctor in a clean white coat to the Bucovinans was that they were even worse off than he was.

He lay down. After a while, he slept. Next thing he knew, it was morning. He approved. Of course, he had no idea whether Aderno had tried a spell of his own during the night. But no news seemed good news.

He wasn’t the only one who thought so. “You didn’t scream. Your magic must have worked,” Rautat said. “It’s a lot more restful when you don’t scream, you know?”

“For me, too,” Hasso said, and the underofncer chuckled, for all the world as if he were kidding. Nobody’d ever tried to blow Rautat’s head off from the inside out. The Bucovinan didn’t know how lucky he was. If he stayed lucky, he would never find out, either.

Hasso did feel a pang at riding away from the remaining pots of gunpowder: they ended up stowing them in the castle on the east bank of the Oltet, which, like Muresh, had been – somewhat – repaired. There was bound to be more explosive in Falticeni. The Bucovinans knew how to make the stuff now, and they wouldn’t have stopped because he’d ridden west.

He did wonder whether Zgomot would have the chopper waiting. If the ruler decided he’d learned enough from the dangerous blond … Hasso shrugged. He just had to hope that wasn’t so. Bottero’s men wanted to kill him. If Zgomot’s did, too… He’d damn well die in that case, and he didn’t know what he could do about it.

“Catapults,” he said out of the blue. He said it in Lenello, but the Bucovinan name was almost the same; the natives had taken the word as well as the thing. It was what Drepteaza called a bastard word, with long and short vowels.

“What about them?” Rautat asked.

“We need light ones on wheeled carts,” Hasso said. “Then they can throw pots of gunpowder at the Lenelli.”

“Oh, yeah?” A slow grin spread over Rautat’s face. “I like that, Lavtrig give me boils on my ass if I don’t. What other sneaky ideas have you got?”

“That would be telling,” Hasso answered. Rautat laughed. So did Hasso, but he wasn’t kidding. What kept him alive was being the goose that laid golden eggs. As long as he could keep laying them, and as long as none of them turned out to be gilded lead, he figured he was all right. If he screwed up, Lord Zgomot would start sharpening that chopper.

So don’t screw up, he thought. Good advice – but hard to live up to.

Coming back to Falticeni wasn’t exactly coming home. Hasso had no home in this world, and wondered whether he ever would. But he knew lots of people in the palace. Zgomot was interesting to talk to. And Drepteaza – was Drepteaza. Hasso sighed. He would be glad to see her. One of these days before too long, he would probably need to get drunk, too.

Hell, he’d done that on account of Velona, too. But it was different with her. He’d got smashed because she screwed Bottero. Drepteaza wasn’t screwing anybody, not as far as Hasso knew. That was the problem.

How the natives stared when he rode through the crowded, muddy, smelly streets with his Bucovinan escort! Nobody had any idea who he was – the Bucovinans figured him for a Lenello. Without photography and printing, nobody except kings could get famous enough for everyone to recognize them. And kings put their portraits on coins, which struck Hasso as cheating.

“Look at that big blond prick,” a Bucovinan said, pointing at him.

“Who are you calling a prick, you asshole?” Hasso replied in Bucovinan. The native gaped. His buddies gave him the horselaugh. Rautat slapped Hasso on the back. They rode on.

“So he did it?” one of the gate guards said to Rautat when they got to the palace.

“He sure did.” The underofficer sounded proud of Hasso. He probably was. If he hadn’t found the Wehrmacht officer in the pit and decided not to finish him off, he wouldn’t have got soft duty at the palace. He was enough of a Feldwebel to know when – and why – he was well off.

“Good,” the gate guard said. “About time we had some magic on our side.”

It wasn’t magic. Lord Zgomot understood that. So did Drepteaza. So did the Bucovinans who worked with gunpowder. As for the rest – well, what if they thought it was? That was probably good for morale.

Grooms came out to take charge of the travelers’ horses. Hasso stretched and grunted. He stumped around bowlegged, like an arthritic chimpanzee. That got a laugh from Rautat and the rest of the Bucovinans. Then he said, “I want a bath.”

“Me, too,” Rautat said. Gunoiul and Peretsh and Dumnez and the others who’d ridden with them nodded.